Product-Led Growth, or PLG for short, is a term first coined in 2016, according to OpenView. PLG is a strategy that’s gained a lot of traction over the last few years, especially related to SaaS companies. And speaking of Traction, Caroline Lewko recently led a panel about DevRel at a conference of the same name in Vancouver, where the topic of PLG was prolific.
So, what exactly is PLG?
According to the Product-Led Growth Collective, PLG is:
a business methodology in which user acquisition, expansion, conversion, and retention are all driven primarily by the product itself. It creates company-wide alignment across teams—from engineering to sales and marketing—around the product as the largest source of sustainable, scalable business growth.
They also tell us that:
Product-led growth leads to a higher revenue per employee—in other words, higher financial productivity. That’s because when the product is the driving force behind acquisition, engagement, retention, and expansion, companies are able to reallocate or save huge sums that would traditionally be spent on scaling sales, marketing, and service efforts.
If we unpack that along with other research, 10 key points of PLG seem to be:
Focus on the user as a customer
A self-service product (at least in the early years)
Free trials
Absence of a sales team
Focus on the user journey
Creating a friction-less user experience
Listening to users for product growth
Facilitating a community to support users and use word-of-mouth promotion
Bottoms-up approach to user acquisition
Importance of cross-functional teams
PLG is also a valuable growth strategy.
You don’t have to look too closely at PLG to see the similarities to a Developer Relations or a Developer-Led Growth strategy. A number of very successful Developer First companies were built on a Developer-Led Growth strategy that began before 2016, including Unity (founded in 2004), MongoDB (2007), Twilio (2008), SendGrid (2009), Stripe (2010), and Datadog (2010).
So let’s conclude that a Developer-Led Growth strategy provides value to a company.
What’s the difference between PLG and Developer-Led Growth (DLG)?
Even though there are many similarities in strategy, when it comes to tactics, there are two key differences between PLG and Developer Led Growth.
1. Developer as the user. In DLG, also called B2D (Business to Developer), understanding the common traits of the Developer - we call them the ‘Developer Truisms’ (see diagram below) - is crucial. In addition, nailing your own unique developer segmentation and developer personas are the first steps to designing the best go-to-market approach.
2. The Developer Journey. In DLG, the ‘try before you buy’ becomes ‘build before you buy’. In reviewing the Developer Journey map, the developer will want to build something, at least as simple as a ‘hello world.’ So, as you can see in the diagram below – the adoption and purchase motion compared to a typical sales funnel is very different, and you must optimize for that.
Still wondering if a Developer-Led Growth strategy has merit or whether your company should put resources into a Developer Program? Take the lessons from PLG to heart. After all, DevRel did it first!